• 15 •
MY GRANDMOTHER PAINTED LANDSCAPES. Though she could, and occasionally did, paint from memory, more often than not she painted what she could see from the front porch. She stored her oils in the foyer closet and her painting supplies in a rusty tin can in the shed.
The one thing my Grandmother refused to do was paint from a photograph. “Flat pictures yield flat paintings,” she told me. “Only nature has any real soul.”
Whenever she tired of her front stoop’s scenery, she would pile me into her Toyota with her oil paints, canvases, sketching pencils, and brushes, and we would drive until inspiration struck her.
I didn’t paint. Not really. While she drove, I filled out books of Word Search puzzles. While she painted, I would go treasure hunting among riverside rocks, or explore fields strewn with hay bales. But every so often, I’d feel the same inspiration that struck her, and then I would stand quietly by her side and set brush to canvas.
“Clutch it like a knife,” my Grandmother instructed me, “hold the brush close to the tip. We’re not painting a fence here, we’re making art.”
I watched my Grandmother scrape the canvas with a brush crested in titanium white—a colour that slowly resolved into snow capped mountains. Then she took her middle finger and smeared the snow down the mountainside.
She stepped back, and said, “Now you.”
I reached for her paint brush, but she laughed. “After playing in the mud last Sunday, you’re afraid of a little paint?” She brought the brush down in an arc, daubed my nose in white.
That painting turned into a field of mustard rippling in the foreground, purple mountains clustered in the back, and a blue sky that canopied all. She pointed out some ripples in the sky to me and asked, “What are those?”
“Birds,” I said, remembering the flight of geese that had flown overhead. My Grandmother watched them fly by and didn’t resume her painting until they’d vanished from sight.
“Wrong. Look again.”
I did look, but I could only see birds in the picture. I shrugged.
My Grandmother pointed at the canvas. “Those are lines,” she said. “Little black lines in the sky. That’s all. But to you, and to everyone else, they’ll be birds. It’s important to leave a few puzzles for the onlooker.” Her red lips parted in a smile. “We wouldn’t want them getting bored.”
‘Nothing’ seemed to be my Grandmother’s favorite subject matter. Or, at least, I considered it to be nothing. Grey beaches. Barren hills. Snow-coated forests. Empty streets. The only exception to that rule that I ever saw was a portrait of me.
“Bullshit,” she said, when I mentioned the lack of people in her artwork. “I paint all of my grandchildren. But, of course, I gift them to each of you when I’m done. What in the world would I do with your faces?” She grinned and added, “But you’re not wrong. There’s nothing quite like nothing.”
When I told my Grandmother that I wanted to be a painter, she beamed down at me magnanimously. “Like you,” I told her. “A painter like you.” In my whole life, I don’t believe I’ve ever said anything that pleased her even half as much as those words.
Grandmother didn’t bequeath my portrait to me. Instead she hung it in the spare bedroom. “Boys your age,” she said, “don’t like to hang up gifts from their Grandmothers, and I’m not going to have my painting stowed in the garage. We’re going to hang it here until you’re old enough to appreciate how beautiful my brushstrokes are and how much skill this painting took.”
That’s what she said, but we both knew that the spare bedroom was quickly feeling like home to me. I’d permanently claimed the bottom drawer in the dresser. I kept a toothbrush in the bathroom down the hall. Impromptu visits to Grandmother’s house were becoming more and more frequent: during the summer, on weekends, after school.
Grandmother said my parents worked themselves to death. She frowned after their cars as they drove away.
Across from the portrait of me, my Grandmother hung the Mustard Field. The bright yellows and purples of the painting jumped from the wall, a splash of nothing to interrupt the eyes of the wallpaper’s owls. She called the painting a collaborative effort to justify my having it, but all I had done was run my finger through the snow.
• 16 •
“A VENDING MACHINE,” I whisper reverently.
I press my palms against the purring machine. It feels like comforting normalcy.
The vending machine is a jarring splash of red and blue in a corridor that’s otherwise as sterile as every other one I’ve wandered. It stands alone, pressed against the wall of a long, empty corridor, plugged into a lonely power outlet. I loiter on the feeling of warm plastic against my fingertips and the machine’s dull mechanical hum that reverberates up my arm.
Willow breaks my reverie: “Two dollars! Robbery! Let’s hold out for a water fountain.”
“Willow….” There’s an unpleasant thought forming, a lump in my throat. “I’m not thirsty.”
“So you can wait.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” I bite my lip. “When you said I was the ghost, it hit me—I haven’t been thirsty. I haven’t been hungry. At all.”
Willow shakes her head. “A lot of people lose their appetite. You’re not dead, stop sulking. Besides, I was looking for water to wash with anyway, not soda pop.”
“Why would you want to wash—”
Willow interrupts me, flicks a hand at my body. I’m dusted white with drywall. My knees and lower legs are mottled with bruises from the copper slide. My right bicep is red with friction burn. I have a cut across my palm. My knuckles, still tender, are brown with dried blood.
Willow raises an eyebrow. “You look like you lost a fight with the Pillsbury Doughboy,” she says.
“I’m surprised you lingered long enough to snoop through my stuff. I would have crept quietly by.”
“Humanitarian,” Willow says with a mock sigh. “It really eats into my ‘me time.’” She fishes into her pocket and produces a two dollar coin. “All right, I was saving this for the boatman, but I’ll come up with something else. You’re a train wreck, and I’m too ashamed to associate with you in that sorry state.”
Willow slides the coin into the machine and pushes a button. A bottle of water falls into the machine’s tray with a heavy thunk. She unscrews the cap and hands the water to me.
The water is cold. Chalky, white rivulets spill down my skin as I rinse off the drywall dust from my face, my hands, and my neck. I spare a little water to rub down my legs and arms.
“Your hair,” Willow reminds me, “unless that’s you going grey.”
To towel off, I strip off my t-shirt, turn it inside out, and use the cleanest parts of it to rub my hair dry. I can feel Willow appraising me—my bruised body and childhood scars—but she doesn’t say anything, and I don’t volunteer any history.
I smile at her discretion from between damp, curly locks of black hair, and then zip the windbreaker over my bare chest. I stuff the wet t-shirt into a back pocket. Maybe it will dry.
As I turn to leave, Willow snatches up the empty bottle I’d abandoned and brandishes it like a rapier. “You’re nuts,” she says. “This is worth, like, five cents. Thirty-nine more of these and I’ll have made my toonie back.”
“You’re holding out for a bottle depot?” I ask, incredulous at how nonchalantly she treats vending machine-quality miracles.
“Some of us care about the environment,” she sniffs. She brushes past me, and doesn’t turn to see if I follow.
As we walk, I notice small, new changes creep into the corridor. First come pipes, painted the same inoffensive white as the walls. They’re small, pencil-thin, and they drip down from the ceiling to run along the corridor at waist-height. As we walk, these pipes swell, until each is as thick as my wrist.
Looking up, I notice a sprinkler system now jutting through the acoustic ceiling tiles. Then I see a shock of crimson against the white wall ahead of us: my first fire alarm. Soon,
these appear periodically through the corridors, and they’re soon joined by small fire extinguishers strapped neatly to the walls.
The building begins to feel more and more familiar. Potted plants appear sporadically, strategically placed to conceal wall sockets and cover embarrassingly empty corners. I spot another vending machine, then another. This maze, brought to you by Pepsi.
Thirty minutes pass. Maybe more. My watch’s minute hand seems to crawl by more slowly than it should.
But even as I grow more comfortable, feeling as if, at long last, Willow has liberated me from the maze, I catch her shoulder-checking.
She’s not looking back at me, she’s looking past me—back the way we came.
She crunches the empty plastic bottle absentmindedly against her leg as she walks. A nervous tic? Her free hand is scrunched up inside her sleeve, fingers clasping the cuff.
“A hot shower,” I muse loudly, when she doesn’t speak. “That’s my first stop.”
Willow turns her head to look at me. She smiles, but her eyes crinkle downward. What is that expression? Concern? Pity?
“What’s on the outside for you?” I ask.
Willow doesn’t answer. She’s ignoring me—or so I think, until her shoulders slump into a shrug. She says nothing else on the subject.
And an uncomfortable silence lingers between us. Our conversation flags and she makes no move to pick it back up. Familiar non-essentials surround us, but she seems more worried now than when the hallways were white and featureless.
So I hum. Willow doesn’t look at me, but the corners of her mouth quirk downwards. Maybe she hates Katy Perry.
I open my mouth, another conversation-starter already on my lips, when I see the light in front of us. Not the humming, white light of fluorescent bulbs—the steel blue of a night sky peeking through a window.
I run past Willow. A laugh rips from my throat. I’m out!
I mean, I’m still in, but I’m out. Out of the endless looping hallways, out of my dull prison, out of that goddamn building—if nothing else.
And I’m on a bridge. It’s suspended fifteen feet above a city street, in the downtown core of a city that reminds me of my home, though it lacks some familiar features. There’s no tower lit up like a glow stick in the distance, and I can’t see the river cutting a dark swath through the city centre, though that could just be my vantage point. Frankly, the city I’m in is less important than the fact that I’ve escaped.
My bridge is encased in glass. I press my forehead against its cool surface and bask in the city sights outside. Moonlight daubs my cheeks, blinks off of the reflective windows of buildings in the distance. A newspaper tumbles down the street, propelled by a breeze I can’t feel. The moon hangs like a lopsided smile overhead.
I don’t hear Willow move to stand at my shoulder, but she sighs at my side after a time. “Let’s keep moving,” she says softly.
“This is the bridge? The one you asked if I’d crossed?”
“One of them. Look behind us.”
I look back, through the glass, at the building we’ve emerged from, and I’m surprised by its mundanity—I expected the Krzywy Domek.
Instead, the building is a three-storey slate-grey brick, squatting on a downtown street corner. Remarkably unremarkable. Ribbon-thin windows, which somehow I managed to avoid altogether while inside of it, do little to detract from the building’s ugliness.
The building on the bridge’s far side is more impressive—an obelisk of reflective glass that stands four times taller. Its surface reflects both the grinning moon and other skyscrapers lit up in the distance.
“Do you know what building that is?” I ask. “What it’s called?”
Willow shakes her head.
“What city are we in?” Willow frowns, but says nothing.
“For a guide,” I say, “you’re not very informative.”
Willow hmphs and says, “Only because you’re still asking all the wrong questions. You’re more concerned with what a place is called instead of, oh I don’t know, ‘why aren’t there any people in the streets?’”
“It’s twenty to something at night.” I tap on my wristwatch. “Not every city has a nightlife. But, sure, why aren’t there any people?”
“There are,” she says. “You just can’t see them yet.”
“Answers like that are why I’m not asking more questions.”
I turn my back on her and I don’t ask her anything else. Willow’s gloom is detracting from our triumph. Instead, I drink in the view, my fingers leaving oily prints across the glass and my breath fogging each pane I stop to ogle through.
Willow tires of the view long before I do. She wanders to the far side of the bridge while I loiter at the window, absorbing the sights. A blue bench beneath a bus stop. A rainbow of cars parked curbside. That old familiar Starbucks mermaid, glowing green across the street.
The blue light deepens as I watch the sleeping city. The moon hides its face behind black clouds. One by one, the stars wink out.
• 17 •
OUR NEW BUILDING IS CARPETED. Our new building is doored. I point out these changes to Willow, who is thoroughly underwhelmed.
The first door handle we encounter is locked. How refreshingly mundane.
Though this building is quite similar to the last, it features frequent fire extinguishers, vending machines, and even some tacky, stock landscape paintings hanging from the walls. I catch Willow casting me sidelong glances and realize that I’m grinning. I don’t stop.
“So what are we looking for?” I ask.
Willow frowns. “You’re sure you didn’t hit your head earlier, right?”
“An elevator … a stairwell … a glowing green exit sign?”
“Exit signs are red,” Willow murmurs, “and we’re looking for the way out.”
“Which will take the form of…?” I jiggle another door handle as we walk by. Locked.
Willow points at an upcoming fork, and I see blue light spilling from the right hand passage.
“Oh!” I shout, swooping by her. “Oh, you’re awesome! You’re wonderful! My hero! That took no time at all!”
Willow doesn’t share my enthusiasm. She maintains her steady pace … and a few seconds later, it’s clear why.
This isn’t the way out. It’s moonlight, shining through the glass panes of a second bridge.
I imagine that my disappointment is palpable, that Willow can feel it oozing off of me as she sidles up alongside and gazes at the world below.
Like the last bridge, this one is also suspended fifteen feet above street level. While this road is also devoid of life, at least the decor has changed: a yellow newspaper bin chained to a lamppost, tread marks tattooed to the pavement, a squat white building opposite with a columned neo-classical façade.
The night sky is darker now. The moon’s been obscured behind a porridge of grey clouds, a canopy illuminated by the street lamps below. It looks like rain.
This bridge feels older than the last—a more antiquated design. Glass panes coat the left and right walls, but the ceiling overhead is opaque and made of black-painted metal. Its design feels blockier, and somehow more enclosing.
I place my palms against the cool glass, stare hungrily at the outside world. I don’t look back at Willow, though I see her standing quietly at my shoulder in the window’s reflection. She takes off the cowboy hat she’s been wearing all this time and settles it back atop my head. My reflection looks ridiculous.
“You okay, Lone Star?”
I sigh. When I speak, it’s to the window’s faint reflection of her already translucent self. “You asked me how many bridges I’d crossed. There’s more to come, hey?”
Her reflection nods.
“We can’t just exit through this building?”
She shakes her head.
“Gonna tell me why?”
She shakes her head again.
I turn around and plaster another grin on my face, though perhaps not as genuine as the on
e I’d worn moments ago. “Well, then I suppose we should mosey along.”
Willow smiles. “After you, partner.”
Our new building is still doored, thank god. It still shows signs of habitation. I grip every door handle I come across. My pace increases after every unsuccessful knob.
The paintings of the last building have been replaced with decorative mirrors, and I witness my reflection’s faux smile slowly melt into a grimace as we continue walking and walking and walking. Gone are the vending machines, though we do encounter our first water fountain and a photocopier sitting silently against a wall.
This building re-adopts the linoleum floors of the office-esque maze I began this nightmare in. My shoes fall back into their familiar squeak against the tiles. Willow’s footsteps are silent.
She’s still not very talkative, but then neither am I. Once, she glances back to ask if I need a respite. I shake my head. My watch now reads thirteen-to-something. Has it only been seven minutes since I last checked, or have hours passed?
We soon find yet another bridge. Drizzle speckles the glass’s exterior and the first fat drops slide down around us. Eager to escape the maze, I don’t loiter to admire the view, so I’m caught off guard when Willow stops abruptly in the bridge’s centre. I pass right through her insubstantial form, only to turn back and see her standing still.
I look back, to see Willow doing the same: she stands with her back towards me, staring down the corridor we’ve just come from.
My neck prickles. “Did we take a wrong—” Willow, apparently listening for something, stabs a hand into the air to cut off my sentence.
I hear nothing but the steady drip of raindrops against glass panes.
“Oh crap,” Willow hisses, then whirls around to face me. “Run!”
Willow grabs my hand and tugs. It’s the strangest sensation I’ve ever felt—someone I can’t feel, with tangible weight behind her fingers, propelling me forward. She hauls me across the bridge and only lets go when we reach the far side. She doesn’t stop there. Instead, she begins racing down the hallway of our new building.
I follow briskly. Infected by her fear, I barely register their porch-blue walls as we turn corners seemingly at random. I’m panicked by the panic in Willow’s eyes whenever she glances back, but there’s nothing there when I peer over my shoulder.
59 Glass Bridges Page 5